The Mandelbear's Musings

There are three projects needing work at the moment: the wheelchair ramp, which is high priority but very short term, my next CD, which is medium priority but longer-term, and the ongoing website reorganization. Guess which one is on my mind right now.

My song directory has gotten unwieldy, to say the least. With over 100 songs in it, both mine and other people's, and with HTML, Postscript, PDF, and two kinds of audio files, there are well over 500 files in there. Linux has no problem with this, nor do the Perl scripts I use to generate index files, but I do -- the directory listing is huge.

In addition, there are more things I'd like to do, for example have multiple versions of some songs, discographies, illustrations, more extensive notes, separate performance notes, transposed versions for performers, sheet music, ... You get the idea.

The obvious thing is to make a directory for each song. This worked well for keeping multiple tracks straight during my recent recording projects, and has the additional desirable side effect of making the songs' URLs shorter. There are, of course, zillions of links out there with the old URLs in them, but that's what redirects are for.

Since everything right now is driven by the lyrics files, which are in a local dialect of LaTeX, I'm going to move those to a Lyrics directory. I'll also put the Postscript files there, because it's very convenient for printing.

Everything else will go into Songs, in a subdirectory whose name is the song's shortname. The only real question at this point is whether the filenames in each song directory should be generic (e.g., lyrics.html, lyrics.pdf) or specific (songname.html, songname.pdf). The former makes more sense if I want to have multiple performances present, and will probably simplify scripts and Makefiles down the road.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled LJ soap opera.